REFRAME Blog

It was the depths of another sticky summer in NYC. Air conditioners buzzed and ice cream trucks called to the children to come and get it.

I was on the phone with Jacob Swenson-Lenyel for our weekly mentoring session. He was in Chicago, in the offices of National People's Action (NPA). We were talking how NPA could break into the narrative around the recently released Clean Power Plan. Jacob talked through how to best analyze the news media coverage of the Clean Power Plan and set the groundwork for a strategic communications approach to campaign design. He decided to do a media narrative analysis of the issue. ​

"I read coverage about the Clean Power Plan in select major news outlets and news outlets in media markets where NPA affiliates were launching campaigns and wrote up my findings about what key characters were showing up and how the conflict of the stories were framed. Our campaign team found the analysis helpful, so I decided to expand it into a study of 154 articles over a 5 month period," Jacob recounted to me recently.

Jacob and NPA just released the public facing report that started as campaign research - Clean Power Plan: A Narrative Power Analysis. Clearly, doing this level of research is super helpful for NPA, as Jacob told me, "Through the research and analysis process I learned a lot about the media environment surrounding the Clean Power Plan. This understanding put me in better position to create communications strategies that allow our messages to breakthrough."

But, this report in't just helpful for NPA, it is helpful to the many organizations and campaigns working on the Clean Power Plan and Just Transition. At ReFrame this type of force multiplier is our gold standard for social justice communications.

Thanks Jacob and the rest of the 2015 Alumni who are embodying what it means to be the next generation of strategic communicators.